644 JUSTIN WINSOR. 



what a great public library should be, and the executive ability to carry 

 out his ideas. He was soon the foremost figure among the librarians of 

 the United States, and in 1876 he was elected the first President of the 

 newly formed American Library Association ; but as yet he was not an 

 historian. During his stay at the Public Library, his bibliographical 

 work was connected rather with the institution than with the progress of 

 American history. In 1877 he was transferred from the Boston Public 

 Library to that of Harvard University. At the Harvard Library there 

 still lingered traces of the old pagan superstition that the worst enemy of 

 books was the general reader, who ought to be kept away from them by 

 every competent librarian. But times were changing. The laboratory 

 method of instruction had been winning one field of education after another, 

 until it was rapidly becoming universal. Now Mr. Winsor, in harmony 

 with the views that were rapidly gaining ground with the Professors, looked 

 upon a library as being, for educational purposes, the laboratory of the 

 literary and historical branches of study ; and he gave his most cordial 

 co-operation in j)Utting the largest number of books at the disposal of 

 the students with the greatest possible freedom. 



But his work at Harvard was by no means confined to increasing the 

 usefulness of the librarj-. ^^ithout deserting his old line of activity^ he 

 opened a new one. lie continued to write and edit bibliographies on 

 various subjects, the most notable at this period being the '• Headers' 

 Handbook of the American Revolution," published in 1879. At the 

 same time he made a new departure by undertaking to write history. 

 Since he published his History of Duxbury as a lad, he had never lost 

 his interest in the subject, and had never failed to devote much time to 

 the study of it; but for more than thirty years he had not attempted to 

 produce a history, and, when at last he took this work up again, it was 

 in the new and peculiar form of co-operative authorship. In his earliest 

 venture of the kind, the " Memorial History of Boston," published in 

 1880-81, he divided and assigned the various portions of the work 

 among a number of writers, while he annotated the whole himself. The 

 first experiment was soon followed by anotlier, the " Narrative and 

 Critical History of America," which was prepared upon the same plan, 

 and published in parts from 1885 to 1889. These works have been 

 criticised on the ground that they lack unity, and that the parts are of 

 unequal value, — defects inseparable from the co-operative authorship. 

 In fact, they are not histories so much as storehouses of information fur 

 historical students, and in this they fulfil the purpose for which they were 

 designed. Mr. Winsor intended them to be a bibliographical and critical 



